I don't know how many will be able to open the New Yorker link (there is a Facebook post that links to it) to this article about Alma Mahler-Werfel, but you know where this is going.

So many of the comments about this are quips about or quotes from the Tom Lehrer song Alma. It isn't surprising that the Facebook followers of the New Yorker page or the magazine itself would know Lehrer songs.

For those who don't "do Facebook", here is the blurb posted above the link to the article:

At 22, Alma Mahler-Werfel gave up ambitions of being a composer to marry Gustav Mahler. After his death, in 1911, she acquired a reputation as a femme fatale, a sort of intellectual dominatrix. She had an affair with the artist Oskar Kokoschka, then was briefly married to the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius. Her final husband was the writer Franz Werfel, whom she followed into exile, first in France and then in the United States, where she lived until her death in 1964.

She was, and remains, “smolderingly controversial,” Alex Ross writes. Her marriages and affairs brought her notoriety and, later, vilification. “At various points in her life, she was both oppressed and oppressor,” Alex Ross writes. “We are confronted by a personality of maddening complexity—no less complex than that of any of the august men around her.” But amid the swirl of affairs, scandals, and imbroglios that made up the astonishing life of Mahler-Werfel, one element remained fixed: her inexhaustible passion for music and the arts. Ross reassesses the life and achievements of the most legendary widow of the 20th century: